


you are the storm

by ninemoons42



Series: in a flash [2]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Books, First Time, Inspired by Art, M/M, Modeling, Photography
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-30
Updated: 2012-01-30
Packaged: 2017-10-30 09:19:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/330175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42





	you are the storm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [papercutperfect](https://archiveofourown.org/users/papercutperfect/gifts), [StarRose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarRose/gifts), [madsmurf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/madsmurf/gifts).



  


title: you are the storm  
author: [](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**ninemoons42**](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/)  
word count: approx. 2050  
fandom: X-Men: First Class  
characters: Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr  
rating: R  
notes: direct sequel to [you are the spark](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/195501.html). Again, [prompt](http://starrose17.tumblr.com/post/16546231121/i-have-a-real-urge-to-read-a-fic-where-raven-is-a) by [](http://starrose17.livejournal.com/profile)[**starrose17**](http://starrose17.livejournal.com/) , with additional [inspiration](http://papercutperfect.tumblr.com/post/16645493026/one-hour-photo-erik-charles-modern-day-setting) from [](http://papercutperfect.livejournal.com/profile)[**papercutperfect**](http://papercutperfect.livejournal.com/) and cheerleading from [](http://madsmurf.livejournal.com/profile)[**madsmurf**](http://madsmurf.livejournal.com/). Modern-day AU, no powers, all details at the linked Tumblr posts.

  
Erik has been in the photography business for about three years and he knows he’s been lucky. People have to be in the right place at the right time, and he has been, and he only hopes he doesn’t squander what he’s got, or become jaded, and goodness knows that’s both so easy and so difficult when he photographs beauty for a living.

Raven Xavier is a rarity, and he thinks he’ll be asked to work with her again soon. She flows from pose to persona to performance – she lives and breathes for the change, for the freedom to be someone else, for the chance to break out of the hypothetical and hypocritical norms. She laughs at jokes that are meant to wound and gives back the sharp humor tenfold. It’s no wonder that the sessions with her were both difficult and immensely rewarding. He barely needed to process the photos afterwards; what comes out is a spark of her truth, and it sets her alight.

But even that experience pales in comparison to that last sitting: the one in which Raven was in his studio shouting encouragement at – her brother.

Erik sorts through the photographs once again and he shakes his head, wondering what he’s doing. He’s got every shot from that session out on his desk, a flurry of six-by-eight prints. Most are in full color. White background, full lighting, and a man with tousled dark hair, highlights in copper and stray silver strands, lines and freckles. Several layers of sweaters and a ratty old coat.

Blue eyes: changeable, fey, strange. Emotions blazing out. Passion, determination, a man summoning up his courage.

Erik catches a breath, picks out the best of the lot. Every photograph is strangely beautiful and compelling, and that’s _without_ any post-processing, but he sets aside _this one_ and _this one_ and _this one_ , stuffing the half-dozen prints into an envelope. He hesitates over the note and doesn’t know why he’s writing it, and his penmanship suffers as a result – but there, he signs his name and he’s sealing the envelope before he can change his mind, he’s dropping it into his secretary’s OUT tray and he’s off for a walk. Hands still reeking of fixer and toner.

///

Two nights later, Erik dreams of a man with blue eyes, smiling from behind the interlocked fingers held up in front of his face.

///

He doesn’t know why he held back the one shot of Charles actually smiling – Erik remembers Raven laughing in Charles’s face, at his expressions, and Erik remembers Charles eventually succumbing to her relentless good cheer. Slowly relaxing, tilting his head inquisitively at the camera instead of being defensive. Eventually, his mouth quirking up into an indulgent smirk, and then a full-blown smile. A self-conscious moment, there and quickly gone, and Erik has only managed to capture it by sheer circumstance – and for some reason Erik is torn between wanting to put it up somewhere in his bare studio, and hiding it from the rest of the world.

///

The call catches him as he’s talking about a possible shoot with Angel Salvadore, Raven’s friend and rival. He’s distracted, and distraction makes him rude, and he mutters an insolent “Who is this” into the phone.

He nearly drops everything when he places the voice asking him out to coffee, or to tea, or to something. “Charles Xavier?”

“Is now a good time?”

Erik doesn’t hesitate, and bolts for his motorcycle.

///

Erik recognizes the coffee shop’s name if not its location, and when he pushes in with his helmet tucked under his arm, all the conversations stop for a moment, all eyes swing to him.

He ignores all of the gawkers in favor of the man raising a hand in his direction.

He’s made good on his word; he’s carrying nothing with him except his keys and his wallet and his helmet. But Erik itches all the same for a shutter button he doesn’t have, for the weight of a camera that he’s not carrying, and instead he fights to commit this scene completely to memory.

Here is Charles Xavier in what seems to be his natural habitat. Here are his feet in banged-up work boots, flat on the wooden floor; here are his hands in knitted half-gloves, crooked fingers and their strangely flattened knuckles folded together around a battered blue-enameled pen, and atop a worn and weathered volume covered in gray leather. Here is his hair, sticking out in every possible direction, framing his freckles. Here is his mouth, red lips curved up in a smile that is simultaneously everything like the smile Erik captured in the photograph and everything that the photograph is missing. Here he is in a sweater, a pristine white collar, and ink-stained cuffs.

He is everything like the man in the photographs and he is nothing like him.

“Hello,” Erik manages as he falls into the seat opposite Charles’s; too late he realizes none of the chairs and none of the tables match, and where Charles is sitting primly in a worn leather armchair Erik has landed in something rickety and wooden that his mother might have placed at her dinner table.

“Good lord you actually didn’t,” Charles says, sounding slightly scandalized. “Do you not feel...like you’re missing something, then, out and about without your camera? Much like I cannot travel without a book and my sister will not leave the house without her handbag?”

“It’s not like you actually gave me a choice,” Erik says, suddenly and instantly comfortable enough to snipe at him, and just to be extra difficult he pours himself a cup from the pot on the table. Sweet earthy scent of tea and honey.

Charles colors, and offers up a tentative apology of a smile, and Erik contents himself with turning the chair back to front and settling in to watch him.

///

How that transitions from a Bronte vs. Austen argument to chess in a small, wind-lashed park, under bare tree branches waving energetically overhead, Erik has no idea. It’s been a while since his last game and Charles has got him down to a handful of pieces, though if he makes a few risky moves he might actually be able to eke out a draw.

But he looks up from his contemplation of the board to see Charles’s eyes on him, and Erik almost forgets to take the next breath.

He’s used to studying people for their imperfections, for the strange angles and alignments in their faces, for the myriad differences and similarities inherent in the same set of physical features.

He’s not used to being studied.

And the expression on Charles’s face is familiar and breathtaking. _Intent_ really is the weakest possible word for it. He looks like he’d rather like to take Erik apart, slowly.

On him, the look is brilliant and blinding, and it makes Erik give up his pretenses. All he needs now is a white flag. “Really?” he manages to say. “Me?”

“Yes, Erik, you, from the moment you insulted me,” Charles says, smiling. There is enough light left to see how the tips of his ears have suddenly turned an interesting shade of vivid pink.

“I’m afraid you’ve caught me without my arsenal at this time,” Erik says, and blindly moves his rook.

“I’m sure we’ll muddle through somehow,” is the response, and then, “Checkmate.”

Erik tips over his king in acknowledgment – and then he practically leaps up from the bench, holds a hand out to Charles, and there is a strange wild delight that thrills up between them, strange and unsteady as the afterimage of a portrait. Light searing across Erik’s eyes even as he speeds back to his apartment, Charles’s arms linked tightly around his waist.

///

Erik has a fairly large apartment by most standards, and he deliberately keeps it empty and uncluttered, the better to let light flow in: neon rainbows and distant stars and the never-ending streams of headlights.

Charles seems to dominate the space anyway. To Erik’s eyes he absorbs light and shadow through his skin, through his eyes – then he radiates it all back out again, slowly, subtly changed for having known him.

Erik wants to photograph him, in his clothes and out of them, in suits and in sweaters, wants to capture his eyes and his hands and his smiles. He wants to take pictures of his handwriting, of his expressions as he reads a book out loud, as he argues passionately, as he makes fun of someone or something.

Erik is still staring when Charles turns around and then, like a schoolboy, puts his hands behind his back and chuckles self-deprecatingly. “Am I going to derail this if I tell you it’s been a while?”

“Absolutely not.” He reacts in exactly the opposite fashion, and he draws in closer, telegraphing his movements, his intentions, until he’s taking both of Charles’s hands in his. Until he’s pressing kisses to those knuckles. “Thank you,” Erik says, quietly, and he’s watching as Charles’s eyes flutter closed, as he reels him in.

Erik kisses him with his eyes wide open, watches him smile into the kiss and press closer, and closer still.

///

Erik peers with interest at every inch of revealed skin as he strips Charles out of his many layers. Freckles all over, not an unexpected thing, and it makes Erik smile and Charles laugh and attempt to hide his eyes.

“Look at me,” Erik demands quietly, and he’s amazed when Charles obeys him almost instantly.

Sometimes he brings his hands into play, as over puckered skin, over lines of strange color. Scars here and there – but Charles merely smiles and murmurs about later, and that hits Erik like the good kind of sucker punch, because this is already a gift to him and now Charles is promising him more.

When it’s his turn, Erik finds himself submitting easily to Charles’s careful hands. Charles murmurs with wonder and admiration at his tattoo, a small stellated dodecahedron on his right forearm, and presses a kiss to the faded ink. He is gentle, and he is so thoroughly focused; Erik is almost torn right in two between the desire to return the favor, and the desire to look away.

But he’s starting to think he might not mind, and might learn to enjoy it, if it’s Charles studying him. Having those blue eyes on him is thoroughly strange and strangely appealing.

When they’re both down to their bare skins, when they’re facing each other across a few inches of ivory-pale sheets, Erik stops thinking about moving too quickly / too slowly; he thinks about this being the only acceptable outcome. Or at least he does so right until the last possible moment of lucidity, until Charles kisses him again, and Erik takes him in. Responding is as easy as breathing.

And Erik catches his breath as Charles responds to him, as he arches up into Erik’s hands, as he smiles and laughs and moves constantly closer.

They slide into an intricate electrified knot, falling together, and Charles looks _beautiful_ once Erik’s got him completely pinned down on the bedsheets. The failing light in the room seems to fall naturally onto freckled and scarred skin.

Erik watches Charles tangle their fingers together, watches his smile shift from incredulous to pleased to _wanting_ , and that’s what pushes him to move, at last; he presses into Charles, encourages Charles to press up into him, and they flow together, sweet and heady smash into Erik’s senses. They splinter and they break on the shores of each other, Charles’s soft cries and Erik’s hands driving him on, driving them both on, and Charles _shatters_ at last, and Erik chases him all the way down.

///

Morning sunlight: Erik wakes, and there are arms wrapped around him, a hand over his heart and one at the back of his head.

He smiles, and Charles who is tucked under his chin murmurs sleepily, “Five more minutes,” and he folds the blankets more securely around them both. Like hell he’s letting Charles up.  



End file.
